Watching the Train Wreck

Those who lack a sense of history will underestimate how hard it is for a White House to avoid scandal. We have had so few White House scandals in the last eight years because it was a top priority, if not the obsession, of the administration to avoid scandal. You only need to look back one year further to see the contrast and get a sense of what is coming. The president-elect has no patience with the need to follow the concepts of ethical behavior, and if the history of his campaign hinted that his administration would be a non-stop parade of scandals, the personnel selection process now confirms that. Cronies, crooks, and conspiracy theorists are on the incoming administration’s A-list. The transition process is being led by business people seeking mainly to make a profit for themselves, while the president-elect has publicly said that conflict-of-interest rules do not apply to the White House. The scandals to follow will be in the news virtually every day for years to come, presenting an ongoing distraction not just for the government, but for the country and the world. While it will be necessary for some of us to keep track of the mischief and criminal goings-on at the White House in the coming years, there will be a decided personal advantage for people who can tune out the news and focus on problem-solving closer to home. It may be a challenging period for those who need to seek publicity for the ventures, but people who can be quietly effective, focusing on a vision and getting things done without much fanfare, may find themselves years ahead of those who must stand and watch the train wreck day after day and year after year.

Stability on Cyber Monday

Cyber Monday is far from over and I certainly don’t want to jinx anyone’s web store, but I am fascinated that I haven’t found any stories of large-scale processing failures from the weekend. For those of us who work close to e-commerce technology, the Cyber Monday tradition has included logging the many capacity-related failures. This may be the first year in which no such failures occurred. Transaction volume is said to be up 10 to 20 percent from last year, so many sites must be experiencing record volume, but it seems they are prepared this time and the platforms are more stable.

Wizardry Over Citizenry

This is not a good period for the idea of citizenry. The collective wisdom and will of the people who make up a country go only so far in the best of times, and in the current era they seem to count for less than usual. The 2016 U.S. presidential election may be taken as a warning sign. The citizenry spoke, and the system chose the runner-up candidate, the one who millions fewer had recommended. If the majority of people fear this system and its actions, it is for good reason. Yet this is the same system that gave us the idea of citizenry. It decides what country each of us belongs to, it chooses the leaders, and it tries to persuade us that by acting collectively we can keep our respective countries out of trouble. This whole bakery was always a front for a business much more seedy, and all the more so now. If citizenry is in a weak state right now, the immediate answer is not to throw more energy into ever more desperation collective and civic actions. Instead, this is a time for a greater emphasis on wizardry. By wizardry, I mean that we need to develop individual skills and use them for small-scale action wherever we find ourselves. The word wizardry serves at the same time as a reminder not to limit our efforts to what the system tells us is possible. The forces that block collective change cannot block individual change. The answers we need will not be televised — television, after all, is another collective medium — but the wizard lives in a larger world, larger even than the “real” world you might have seen on TV. Imagine a world large enough to hold all the answers. Then look around.

Black Friday Check-In

Black Friday retail traffic appears to be down from last year, but the story is not as simple as that. From the scant observations and hearsay available to me, Black Friday Eve shopping was up, Black Friday morning traffic was down sharply, and Black Friday afternoon traffic was up from last year. Online shopping was expected to be up sharply but there are not good metrics available yet. Analysts generally expect in-store purchases for Thanksgiving weekend to be down 3 percent from last year. Computing devices seem to be the hottest category, helping to explain the shift to online purchases. Mall apparel shops seem to be suffering the worst, with foot traffic said to be down about 20 percent from last year.

Mood is key, though, and no one seems to have a sense of the shopper’s mood. To retailers, there is a world of difference between a socks-and-sweaters mood and a home-theater mood. Retailers hope that the best wage growth in a decade this year will have shoppers spending more ambitiously, but there is little sign of that. Households wondering about moving to another country or the risk of losing jobs won’t be in a spending mood, and that effect could reduce retail totals even if the overall mood were positive. To show how complicated it is to summarize the mood of the shopper, here are summaries from five real people from today:

• Worked in an office all day. Too tired to go out anywhere.
• Spent the day visiting relatives. Surprised to get to the end of the day without having set foot in a store.
• Purchased a software package online. Saved 50 percent with early Cyber Monday pricing.
• Picked up pizza. Does that count?
• Visited seven stores. Bought a reliable brand of jeans and a winter jacket.

It was going to take the biggest Black Friday ever to make up for sluggish sales earlier in November, and no one so far is suggesting that has happened. On the other hand, retail traffic was strong enough to say that this Christmas shopping season won’t be the debacle that some had feared.

Retail in a Black Friday Funk

Looking at U.S. holiday-season retail, it is hard to separate the effects of the decline of Black Friday, a jaded post-election public, and consumer time pressure. What is clear already is that this holiday shopping season will be different.

Retailers didn’t even try to draw consumers away from the distractions of the political season. The words “Black Friday” did not appear in my mailbox until last Thursday and have popped up in my email only twice, with one mention on Monday and one on Tuesday. This is a striking turnaround from just a few years ago when it seemed that Black Friday encompassed the entire month of November. With so much hype along with a few violent deaths, it is no wonder that Black Friday lost its allure. The change became obvious last year with a stark dropoff in in-store sales on Black Friday. 

The meaning of Black Friday has changed anyway. It was the symbolic start of Christmas shopping if you look back to the 1990s, but now is seen by more shoppers as the finale of the season. Most purchases are made throughout the month of November. Any purchases these shoppers cannot make by Black Friday will be placed online no later than Cyber Monday. 

This year, though, all bets are off. Retailers are telling me that they have not yet seen detectable levels of holiday shopping traffic this season, and in my own visits to stores I haven’t seen it either. With a washout in the first half of the holiday shopping season, it would take a record-breaking second half to bring things in line with retailer expectations. Yet the almost complete absence of Black Friday hype hints that that won’t happen. The shopper sentiment I am hearing can be summed up as procrastination, a feeling along the lines of “Don’t remind me.” None of the shoppers I talk to have made any shopping plans at all, for Black Friday or otherwise. 

If that feeling abruptly changes during the Thanksgiving holiday, we could see the biggest Black Friday ever. If not, Christmas shopping this year might consist of shoppers shopping on their lunch hours and taking home just enough socks, sweaters, and games to get by. After we have a chance to see Black Friday retail traffic, we may get a clearer idea of where this shopping season is heading.